Along with the increase of bandwidth capabilities in communication systems, video communication systems have become increasingly popular in both business and residential applications. Indeed, in the case of geographically distributed team collaboration, these systems avoid the travelling of the team collaborators and increase flexibility.
Videoconferencing technologies use video and audio communication to allow a plurality of people to communicate at a same time, for instance for meeting activities. Furthermore, besides the audio and visual transmission of meeting activities, videoconferencing technologies can be used to share documents and display information.
Each participant in a videoconference is filmed by a camera which generates a video stream representing the participant in his/her own environment. To create a video conference, two different technologies are generally used.
In a Video mixing based conference, all incoming video streams from N participants are combined by a Multiparty Conference Unit (MCU) in one mixed video stream. The mixed video stream includes the video streams of all the participants joined together. The mixed video stream is sent to the N participants.
As opposed to video mixing, video routing technology consists in having each participant send his own video stream to all other parties, which simultaneously decode up to 4 or 5 of them. Each video client device has thus to support receiving and decoding multiple flows.